


be all my sins remembered

by sarapod (four_right_chords)



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: M/M, Mental Breakdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 11:03:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10592688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/four_right_chords/pseuds/sarapod
Summary: Geoffrey's life has been lived in the spaces in between and the words left unspoken.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beloved beta, who is not in fandom and read this anyway.

“If you don't know they're here,” Geoffrey is saying to a terrified Jack, in whom he sees - not his Hamlet, certainly, but the possibility of an entirely new one, “then your audience is you. And those people in the seats. But you have to decide.”

“Now?” Jack mutters, wide-eyed and approximately three seconds from shattering.

“Right now,” Geoffrey says. “Right now. You keep the decision to yourself if you want to. But you have to decide.”

What Geoffrey doesn’t say - what he’ll never say - is that _he_ never decided. 

* * *

When Geoffrey was a very young man studying theater in the middle of the prairies, he met another very young man studying theater in the middle of the prairies. The other young man wore terrible scarves and had flashing eyes and talked endlessly about things Geoffrey knew he didn’t understand, because Geoffrey sat next to him in class and watched him practice his signature for ninety minutes instead of taking a single note. He was also the first person in Geoffrey’s life to really _listen_ when he talked, even if it was just to disagree with every word he said. Darren was a tornado, and he left Geoffrey as turned upside down as if he were a flimsy house. 

Geoffrey is nineteen and when his head hits the wall, he feels the vibration through every inch of his body. Darren’s hands are on his hips and Darren’s mouth is on his cock and Geoffrey knows now that he is every bad thing his father ever said about him, he’s every inch the faggot he’s been called since before he knew what that word meant, but at this very moment he can’t bring himself to care. 

Darren has the worst theater opinions Geoffrey has ever encountered in the wild. Geoffrey sinks his fingers into Darren’s hair and moans and comes, and afterwards he observes that he’s never felt this strongly about anyone, ever. He’s pretty sure that has to mean love but he can’t quite tell. 

* * *

It’s not that Geoffrey doesn’t like women. Geoffrey likes women. Geoffrey just likes Darren more. 

* * *

What no one understood about the duel was that mostly, it was foreplay. Insane, bloody, public foreplay, maybe, but foreplay nonetheless. Everyone heard Darren scream about how Geoffrey had cut him, but no one else was there afterwards, when Darren fucked him into incoherence while mumbling something about “my blood here mixes with thine own again.” It’s not actually from any of the plays, but it’s iambic pentameter, which is close enough. 

It was only later, after everything went to hell, that the duel became something they allowed other people to interpret.

* * *

Ellen knew, of course. He’d had to tell her - she was his first woman since high school, and he felt he needed to preemptively explain what he believed would be an observable lack of facility in the bedroom. He in fact did just fine, but by that point it was far too late for him to take back his big gay secret. Either way, he figured, they were actors. No one cared in the theater. And Ellen didn’t care, not on any moral level, but she even more than most actors was a creature composed of pure ego, and so she just …. forgot. He doesn’t realize how thoroughly she’d portrayed forgetting until the first time they go to bed together since the last time they went to bed together, and Ellen in her raging insecurity asks him if he’s been with any firm young actors since the last time he had sex with her. It’s the first time she’s openly acknowledged being aware that he is anything other than devoutly heterosexual. 

Ellen is predictable, unchangeable, constant in her inconstancy as March weather, and Geoffrey loves her.

* * *

Oliver tried, more than once. Geoffrey just pretended not to see him.

* * *

Geoffrey doesn’t know what going mad is like for other people, but for him, it wasn’t falling off a precipice. It wasn't a gradual journey, either - on some level, he’d felt this way for years - it was something both faster and slower. Geoffrey, at dead least, knew madness was coming for him. He couldn’t stop it, but he saw it coming. 

He’d been close before. There was the time at university when he stayed up for four days straight trying to memorize all of _Doctor Faustus_ before collapsing in Darren’s lap, shaking with sobs and feeling Darren’s hands flit like birds over his hair. Darren was of course completely out of his depth but still human enough, then, to want to help. That had been a bad time. Then there was the time after university when he couldn’t sleep but also couldn’t get off the couch, when the only thing between him and starvation seemed to be Darren’s righteous rage and also Darren’s omelettes. He knew what it was like to have madness lurking around the corner, waiting like a thief to steal your mind away. He’d never before experienced it like a freight train, barrelling towards him on train tracks straight enough that he could see it coming but too fast for him to get out of its way.

What he’s never told anyone is that in a certain sense, he’s glad he went mad. His Hamlet will go down as one of the greats, and no one will ever have to know that it was so great because he wasn’t entirely acting.

* * *

Long before Darren fully embraced Brecht and Barthes and later, hideously, musicals, he was a very young man with flashing eyes who’d grown up thinking he was the only fag in Saskatchewan. When he found the theater, he realized that wasn’t true. Of course, there was no one else like him - there could never be anyone quite like Darren Nichols - but the world, as it turned out, was full of people who were close enough that he could no longer be said to be quite so desperately alone. He flung himself at the theater like a drowning man at a life raft, which in point of fact he was. 

Darren met Geoffrey when he was nineteen and fully engulfed in his original theatrical obsession, which was finding the homosexuality in everything and trying to put it onstage. Geoffrey at nineteen was as tall as he’d ever get but nowhere near the weight his frame demanded, leaving him stoop-shouldered and hollowed out. Darren couldn’t think of a better Caius Marcius to play against his Aufidius.

“The gay _Coriolanus_?” Geoffrey asks, skeptical. His head is on Darren’s thigh as Darren sits up in bed, making notes in the text in red pen. 

Darren spares him a scathing look before returning to his mark-up. “Darling, _Coriolanus is_ the gay Coriolanus.” He flips to the middle of his book, says, “You know the story, yes?” and misses the equally scathing look Geoffrey shoots him in return. “O Marcius, Marcius!” he begins, and - 

The thing is this. Darren is not a particularly good actor. He’s going to be a good director someday, maybe a great director, but he’s not a good actor. Geoffrey knows this and doesn’t hold it against him, because Darren doesn’t want to be an actor and doesn’t, actually, have any pretensions about his skill in this area. He turns in workmanlike versions of whomever he’s cast as while drawing sparks of greatness out of whomever he rehearses with, and everyone is more or less content with it. But as he reads Aufidius, glancing back and forth between Geoffrey and the page, Geoffrey is captivated. 

“Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart a root of ancient envy. If Jupiter should from yond cloud speak divine things, and say 'Tis true,' I'd not believe them more than thee, all noble Marcius.” He drops his eyes to the page, mouthing the text to himself quickly, then sets the book down and looks directly into Geoffrey’s eyes. He slides down the bed and wraps an arm around Geoffrey, pulling him close. “Let me twine mine arms about that body, where against my grained ash an hundred times hath broke and scarr'd the moon with splinters,” Darren recites, pressing his hips forward, and Geoffrey snorts even as he reaches out to bring Darren closer to him.

“I’m sure it hath,” he says. Darren thwaps him on the head and continues. 

“Here I clip the anvil of my sword,” he murmurs, sliding his hand down to Geoffrey’s ass, “and do contest as hotly - ” pulling Geoffrey closer, kissing his neck - “and as nobly with thy love - ” arching forward, rubbing his cock on Geoffrey’s hip - “as ever in ambitious strength I did contend against thy valour.” 

Geoffrey gasps, and Darren pushes him onto his back, their legs tangled. “Know thou first, I loved the maid I married,” he begins, and Geoffrey snorts. Darren pinches him. “Never man sigh'd truer breath - ” Now Geoffrey is openly laughing, though his laughs keep cutting off into moans when Darren drags their cocks together. “But that I see thee here, thou noble thing! More dances my rapt heart than when I first my wedded mistress saw bestride my threshold,” he finishes, and Geoffrey smooths his hands over Darren’s shoulders, resting on his upper arms. 

“Darren,” he says, as Darren bends down to kiss Geoffrey’s chest, “you’re going to have to work harder than that to convince an audience that you ever loved a maid.”

Darren bites him, then sits back on Geoffrey’s thighs, hands braced on his chest. “Why, thou Mars!” he says, and he’s grinning now. Never a good sign. “I tell thee, we have a power on foot; and I had purpose once more to hew thy target from thy brawn, or lose mine arm fort: thou hast beat me out - ” at this he grabs his own cock, gasping - “twelve several times, and I have nightly since dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me - ”

“Jesus,” Geoffrey says, whether at the show Darren’s putting on or the text, he can’t say.

“We have been down together in my sleep,” Darren gasps, pitching forward and bringing their cocks into solid contact, wrenching a cry from Geoffrey, “unbuckling helms, fisting each other's …. throat,” he clenches their hands together, “and waked half dead with nothing.”

The rest of the text is lost to their moans. They’re nineteen; it doesn’t take long.

Afterwards, chest heaving, Geoffrey says, “That how you’re gonna stage it?”

“Not quite,” Darren says, “but not far off.”

“Well,” Geoffrey says. Pauses. Drops a hand to Darren’s hair. “We’ll see how that lands.”

The faculty advisor at least has the courtesy to look sorry when she tells Darren he can’t do it, but following up her apology with concerns about lewdness, especially “in light of current events,” leaves no doubt as to where she stands on the idea. Darren rages that night, slamming pots and pans in their tiny galley kitchen and cursing every talentless philistine hack ever to walk through the doors of the drama department. Geoffrey listens, hands clasped between his knees, and says nothing until Darren flings down a kitchen knife and cuts out Geoffrey’s heart.

“We’re not _wrong_ ,” he hisses between his teeth, staring holes into the linoleum. “We’re not _wrong_ or _lewd_ or - or _aberrant_.” He looks up at Geoffrey, who is horrified to see tears in Darren’s eyes. “I know they - we - I know everyone’s fucking dying in America, but that doesn’t - ” He stops, and Geoffrey’s out of his chair before he knows what he’s doing, even though he’d take even odds at Darren punching him in the mouth as letting Geoffrey hold him. But he gets his arms around Darren’s shoulders without incident and is allowed to pull Darren into his chest, even though Darren stands in the circle of Geoffrey’s arms like he’s made of stone.

“We’re not wrong,” Geoffrey says quietly, with a fierceness he’s only learning to believe in the performance of it. “Apthorp’s an ass who couldn’t have appreciated your show even if she’d seen it.” He pauses, then risks it, out as he already is on an impossible tightrope. “It would have been beautiful, Darren.”

At that, Darren unclenches, and then he starts to shake. Geoffrey holds on.

They don’t have many tender moments in their years together. Geoffrey holds that one in his heart, twisted as it was. When Darren comes to New Burbage and tries to stage the most sexless _Romeo and Juliet_ known to man, it’s _Godspell_ Geoffrey uses to change his mind, but he’s thinking of that long ago _Coriolanus_ that never saw the light of day. 

* * *

What Geoffrey doesn’t say is that when he first met Jack, he saw nothing in him, not even a shitty Hamlet. What Geoffrey doesn’t say is that the Hamlet he wrung out of Jack was, first and foremost, a fuck you to New Burbage for trying to commercialize the greatest role ever set to paper in such an overt and crass way. What Geoffrey doesn’t say is that he didn’t realize he wanted Jack’s Hamlet until he saw how badly Jack wanted it.

* * *

Darren and Geoffrey don’t end with a bang, as everyone who knows them would have predicted. Instead it’s a drawn-out, horrible whimper. Geoffrey is accepted into the Young Company at New Burbage shortly after graduation and Darren, by some miracle, is awarded a year-long directorial fellowship. They get a flat together because the thought of living in the house with the Young Company makes Geoffrey want to live in the woods like a hermit, and because they’ve never quite mastered the art of keeping their hands off each other and a flat seems wiser than hoping no one in the Young Company is an unreconstructed bigot. But they’re both working eighty hours a week and it’s doing nothing to soften their rough edges. Darren disagrees with pretty much every decision Geoffrey’s directors make and feels it his duty to lambaste them in absentia; Geoffrey has serious concerns about the direction Darren’s production design is going; Darren thinks Geoffrey’s wasting his talent following the direction of these barbarians; Geoffrey doesn’t think “waste” is a strong enough word for what Darren is doing with his talent. But they spend so little time together that those arguments get hashed out over weeks instead of meals, and one day in February Geoffrey can’t remember the last time talking to Darren made him feel excited instead of angry. 

And the thing was, Darren always made him angry, but for as long as they’d been together that anger had been swirled with interest and passion and the recognition of a mind equal to his and eager to spar. Now there’s just anger, cold and bitter. Geoffrey still loves him - he doesn’t actually know if he’ll ever stop - but it isn’t enough anymore.

* * *

The thing about Oliver’s _Hamlet_ , the thing about it which everyone forgot, is that it shouldn’t have been any good. If Geoffrey was too old to play Hamlet, which he was, Ellen was past too old to play Ophelia. Oliver had just begun to explore really dramatic production design and his principal idea for _Hamlet_ was to signify Elsinore’s seaside chill by drowning the stage in smoke for most of the show. Frank was in that terrible period of early deafness where he hadn’t yet accepted that he needed a hearing aid, and he kept missing entrances. Worst of all, their Horatio was early shades of Claire seven years later: arrogant, overdramatic, utterly bereft of talent, and irreplaceable, in this case due to an idiotic contract for which New Burbage’s attorney would later be fired. The production, in short, was a disaster which should by rights have limped to opening and been put out of its misery after six unremarkable and poorly reviewed weeks.

But the Hamlet that came pouring out of Geoffrey, channeled by Oliver with the same combination of meticulousness and terror with which one might reroute a river, meant that no one noticed any bit of the rest of it. Ellen’s age and Horatio’s dramatics and the idiotic smoke were invisible, burned away by Geoffrey’s raw light. “Incandescent,” Ellen would later say, and she wasn’t wrong. Geoffrey burned. And in front of all their eyes, he burned clear away. 

(The show finished its run after Geoffrey’s breakdown, which is the other thing no one talks about. Without Geoffrey’s creeping madness illuminating Hamlet from the inside, its yawning deficiencies were all too obvious. Ellen might as well have been the stage manager doing line readings for all the chemistry she had with Geoffrey’s understudy. The reviews were crushing.)

Jack doesn’t burn. Jack can’t play Hamlet as truly mad because Jack wouldn’t know madness if it hit him with a pig truck. But his antic disposition has a different kind of truth to it. Jack’s Hamlet is full of Jack’s worst fears, of being found wanting while trying to serve something greater than himself, of how that desperation can be its own kind of madness. It’s a solid interpretation, and most importantly it’s sustainable. Geoffrey remembers standing on that stage after not sleeping for two nights, not needing to sleep, knowing that his Hamlet’s lauded disintegration was more about lifting the veil he kept over his own inner tumult than about his talent, feeling in his bones that _it_ was coming for him again, and then packing all that away because the ways in which this felt good were too much to ignore. He remembers all that, and feels a profound gratitude for Jack’s grounded Hamlet with his more pedestrian fears.

* * *

Oliver’s staging was never inspired, but Geoffrey couldn’t deny the power of how he’d blocked Hamlet’s initial entrance. Geoffrey starts off hidden behind Claudius’ throne, entirely obscured by the chair’s ornate back. When he first speaks, “A little more than kin and less than kind” echoes through the theater, as if from nowhere. Claudius peers around in befuddlement while asking Hamlet how the clouds still hang on him, and Geoffrey responds, “Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun” while emerging from behind the chair, not moving fully into the light until after he says ‘sun.’ 

It’s good blocking, if a bit on the nose, and as Geoffrey takes his place behind the throne, he fills himself with bitterness as though he was an empty glass. It’s not hard. All he has to do is glance into the wings, which he knows hold both his Ophelia and his director, and it’s like opening a tap. 

“My cousin Hamlet, and my son,” he hears, and the bitterness overflows, and he spits, “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” It rebounds off the ceiling. 

He knows, on some level, that there’s something happening here that he should be paying attention to, but when he breathes in, he breathes the damp sea air of Elsinore, and ignores it. As he rounds the throne, there’s a roaring in his ears for just a second. It sounds like the whistle of an oncoming train.


End file.
